This project develops a mobile distributed vehicular testbed equipped with sensory and communication devices for experimentation with emerging networking and application development challenges in the domain of vehicular participatory sensing. The project is motivated by the emergence of a new type of computing and social applications enabled by the proliferation of sensors of everyday use, such as GPS devices and car speedometers. These applications rely on self-selected communities of volunteers to perform data collection and sharing for purposes of mutual interest. Of particular interest to this project are applications that help reduce transportation energy cost and carbon footprint. For example, by sharing data on speed, fuel efficiency, and location of vehicles, better real-time navigation services can be developed that guide drivers to routes that are maximally fuel-efficient for their cars, hence reducing transportation carbon footprint. The testbed facilitates the investigation of several research challenges towards enabling such applications including the investigation of data privacy, energy-efficiency, disruption-tolerant communication, social networking, and management of interactive complexity. No common testbed is currently available that allows researchers to experiment with a live vehicular data collection system of non-trivial size for the purposes of investigating such challenges. By building such a testbed, this project helps usher in a new era of sensing applications with more integration of humans, networks, and the physical world, which may have a significant impact on the economy, energy, and the environment by reducing transportation energy cost and carbon footprint.
